We did not yet know what manner of horror it was. None of us had experienced an attack of the sort. We ran to and fro like ants whose hill has been molested. Some fired their guns at random, others awaited orders. The frightful, livid thing came on, expanded to a cloud, crept upon us, glided into the trenches. The air was quickly obscured. We were swimming in an atmosphere stained a venomous color, uncanny, indescribable. The sky appeared greenish, the earth disappeared. The men staggered about for a moment, took a gasping breath, and rolled on the ground, stifled. There were some knots of soldiers who had been asleep in their beds when overtaken by the gas. They writhed in convulsions, with vitals burning, with froth on the lips, calling for their mothers or cursing the German. We gathered them up as best we could; we took them to the doctors, who, thus confronted by an unknown condition, found themselves powerless. They tried the application of oxygen and ether in an effort to save the lives of the victims, only to see them die, already decomposed, in their hands. The masks had not yet been perfected and were a poor protection. Some ran about like madmen, shrieking in terror, the throat choked with saliva, and fell in heaps, in contortions of agony. Some filled the mouth with handfuls of grass and struggled against asphyxiation. Others, down in the shelters, sprinkled face and neck with brackish water, and awaited a death all too long in coming.[E] Over all this the artillery shrieked in unchained madness. The sky was of steel, quivering and molten. There were no longer any distinctly heard shots, but a storm of fire. It roared, it whistled, it exploded without respite, as if all the furies of hell were yelping, in a thick, metallic sky. At the left, little by little, an ever-reddening glow showed the neighboring city of Rheims, which the Boches were bombarding in a mad rage of destruction. We saw the flames leap up, the houses kindle like torches and throw toward the sky clouds of sparks and streams of black and red smoke. Everything seemed flaming and tottering and falling in a wild delirium. The earth itself opened to swallow the last survivors. In the trenches the bodies of the dead were heaped, and twisted or bleeding corpses choked the passageways. Fiercely, convulsively, desperately, the comrades who were unhurt fought at their loopholes. Reinforcements came from the rear in haste, and took their places. Their eyes were those of madmen, their breath was panting. “The assault will be here in a minute, boys,” I said to my nearest neighbors. “Look out for yourselves. Have your cartridges ready. You, there, lift your gun higher, or you will fire badly! And you, aim toward that corner you see over there!” Berthet helped me, with a tragic manner of responsibility; the underofficers ran from one man to another crying: “Keep cool! We will get them! Just let them come on!”